Existentialism, structuralism and Roland Barthes

The history of philosophy, like many other disciplines, also has its stereotypes, its topoi, that need to be deconstructed. Doing history of philosophy, history of thought in general, serves this purpose: to reconsider our misinterpretations, our too-rapid readings, so we can produce a true analysis of the problems of an author, or of an intellectual current. Among the topoi of contemporary philosophy stands the radical opposition between Sartre's existentialism, an intellectual movement that was hegemonic in the immediate post-war period, and structuralism, which reached its apogee in France in the 1960s. An overly simplistic view of this opposition would make structuralism a movement that essentially built itself in conflict with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986).There would thus be a contradiction between two theories, expressing at the same time an opposition between two generations of intellectuals: existentialism dominating the years of the Liberation, after the Occupation of France by the Third Reich, and structuralism as the new dominant current in the 60s, at least until the historic rupture of May 68 (1). This opposition is said to have reached its apogee in the famous chapter of The Savage mind, entitled “History and Dialectics” (2), published in 1962 by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), which clearly opposes the Sartre's theses from Critique of Dialectical Reason (3), the first volume of a philosophical sum published two years earlier. In his book, Lévi-Strauss sharply attacks the universalist pretensions of Sartre's dialectics, which he sees as the legacy of a Eurocentric philosophy that has been outdated (4) by recent discoveries in the human sciences. As for Sartre, he replies to Lévi-Strauss that his structural analysis is a negation of the historicity of societies, and therefore of human freedom (5).

But are we really sure that the structuralist intellectuals all built their theories against existentialism? Wouldn't some of them also have built those theories with it? Defending the first binary thesis would be a way of invisibilising singular and fascinating personalities, such as the ethnologist Jean Pouillon (1916-2002), who succeeded in accomplishing this difficult challenge: being friends with both Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, being methodologically structuralist in his research and directing the anthropology journal L'Homme, while at the same time being a member of the editorial committee of Les Temps modernes, Sartre and Beauvoir's famous journal.

Even more emblematic than Pouillon, opposing existentialism and structuralism as two theoretical fronts in struggle would lead to a reductive vision of Roland Barthes’s work (1915-1980). Indeed, while Barthes is obviously one of the greatest figures of structuralism, particularly in literary theory and semiology, one cannot deny the lasting influence that Sartre's work had on him. It is worth noting, moreover, that this claimed loyalty to Sartre is present in Barthes's work right up to the end. We are thinking in particular of Barthes's last major book, published shortly before his accidental death in 1980: Camera lucida: Reflections on Photography (6), which is undoubtedly one of Barthes's theoretical summits in his aesthetic semiology of the image, as well as being a masterpiece of writing in terms of its literary form. How could we forget that this last work is dedicated to Sartre's The Imaginery (7), one of the young existentialist's first phenomenological essays? But this filiation with Sartre can already be found at the beginning of Barthes's work, notably in Writing Degree Zero, published in 1953. First of all, Barthes refers to Sartre as a novelist, since when he develops his concept of “Writing Degree Zero” with concrete literary models, the semiologist explicitly mentions Sartre and Ferdinand Céline’s novels (8). Furthermore, by titling the first part of his essay “What is Writing?” (9), Barthes deliberately links himself to Sartre's conception of literature, and to his theory of art in general, as the existentialist developed it in 1948 in his aesthetic manifesto: What is Literature? (10).

But on closer examination, it is the very concept of “writing”, in the sense Barthes gives it, that is very Sartrean. Indeed, if the semiologist has developed a new concept with “writing”, it is precisely because other realities, well known to literary theory, and even aesthetic theory in general, do not suit him. For example, unlike many literary and artistic theories, the semiologist does not value “style”, which fascinates many aestheticians. To entirely understand the concept of “writing”, let us return to the various definitions the author gives in his essay. Barthes writes:

“Language and style are blind forces; (...) language and style are objects” (11), and we might add that it is precisely because they are “objects” that they can be the topic of a science, such as linguistics, art history, stylistics and so on. On the contrary: “writing is an act of historical solidarity” (12). Barthes is precise here: “writing is an act”, so we should note that it belongs to the domain of ethics. We will come back to this point later. The semiologist goes on to explain that “writing is a function: it is the relationship between creation and society, it is literary language transformed by its social destination” (13). The refusal to reduce art to “style” is radical in Barthes, who even asserts that: “Style stands outside art, that is, outside the pact that binds the writer to society” (14). Unlike style, “writing” is “the writer's reflection on the social use of his form and the choice he assumes” (15). “Writing (...) is precisely here that the writer clearly individualizes himself, because it is here that he commits himself” (16). And he concludes: “writing is therefore essentially the morality of form”.

We understand that, for Barthes, it is not even “language” that is the issue in literary art. It is rather the process of the subject's inscription in language, and the formal creativity which is the aesthetic manifestation of this subjective inscription. And it is thanks to such creativity that the artist can take up a position as a free subject in a social and historical world. We can discern here the very ethical, and therefore political, dimension of the Barthesian concept of “writing”. As we said earlier, the mere act of writing has an immediate ethical issue, precisely because it is an act. Here we return to the etymological Greek meaning of ethics, which refers to the concept of “ethos”, often translated as “customs” or “habits”, but which actually designates the act itself: the action, the gesture. We recall, for example, that in Aristotle's Poetics, when the Greek philosopher attempts to produce a precise definition of “tragedy”, he refers to it as “an imitation of the action” (17), and the Greek word Aristotle uses to designate “action” in this case is precisely the concept of “ethos”. Moreover, in Barthes's definition of “writing”, we explicitly find the Sartrean concept of “commitment”, and as with Sartre, “commitment” is only the commitment of a “subject”. It is in “writing” that “the writer clearly individualizes himself”, according to Barthes, and thus becomes a “subject”, “because it is here that he commits himself”. We understand that, for Barthes, the act of signifying, the act of signification, particularly in the case of the writer, calls on the individual to become a free subject. And “writing” reveals this freedom through an act that positions the subject in relation to the social and historical world, that is to say, in relation to society itself. There is no contradiction between the writer's becoming-subject and the constitution of a relationship to society, for it is precisely in the act of writing that the writer positions himself as a social subject. He situates himself in relation to society, in other words, he takes a real stand. In doing so, the act of writing, like the various productions of meaning, is an ethical behaviour, which in itself presupposes a political destination. Obviously, here we understand the word “political” in the broadest and most philosophical sense of the term, as it was already understood in Antiquity, as in the sense of the individual's action in the city, in the Greek “polis”, in accordance with Aristotle's famous thesis that “man is a political animal” because “only (...) man has language” (18). It is because the human being lives in meaning, in a world of signs, that he is an ethical being, and that his life itself is political.

True to his concept of “commitment”, the ethico-political destination of the act of signification is beyond doubt for Sartre, particularly when it concerns literature. Indeed, we are obliged to consider that the Barthesian theory of “writing” is an extension of Sartrean aesthetics when we return to Sartre's famous essay-manifesto: What is Literature?. Sartre writes:

Speaking is acting: anything we name is no longer quite the same, it has lost its innocence. (...) So, in speaking, I unveil the situation through my very project to change it; I unveil it to myself and others in order to change it; (...) with each word I say, I commit myself a little more in the world (...), what change do you want to bring to the world through this unveiling? The “committed” writer knows that speech is action: he knows that to unveil is to change, and that we can only unveil by projecting to change. (19)

In this excerpt, we read how much the concept of “writing” owes to Sartre's theorization of “literature”, developed by the existentialist just after the Second World War. Writing is already acting, for Sartre, because it always means choosing: choosing to unveil the world, or to unveil something of the world, in one way rather than another. But the simple act of “speaking” is also already acting because to manifest a meaning about the real is already to act on the real. This immediately raises the question of the subject's freedom regarding the change produced by signification. The ethical and political dimension of every act of discourse, whether written or oral, is clearly one of the most essential points of Sartre's literary theory, a central aspect that opens the way to a conceptualization of semiological essence.

In this sense, there is indeed a “morality of form” (20), as Barthes asserts in Writing Degree Zero. The act of producing meaning, of speaking and writing, is in itself a moral question. It is no stranger to ethics. Indeed, “the form” we choose to manifest this act of signification, notably in “writing”, commits us. To say or to write in a certain way, through a certain “form”, is to say or to write a certain semiotic content rather than another. Form and content are obviously inseparable, and dialectically linked, at the level of signification, and this is even more the case when it comes to literature. We should also note that this integration of ethics into semiotics never left Barthes. Even when he was closest to Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, particularly in Mythologies, where he tried to apply to the consumer society of 1960s France the same method that anthropology had developed to understand the myths of extra-European peoples, Barthes maintained the ethical problem. Although the semiologist claims that “myth is a language” (21), and can therefore be structurally studied like any language since Saussure, this does not prevent him from calling for a “moral of sign” (22). For Barthes, structural analysis always has an ethical aim.

The “visual” according to Serge Daney:

We might therefore ask ourselves how this Sartre and Barthes’s problem, which comes more from literary theory, concerns the question of the image at its very deepest core? Of course, literature also produces images, verbal images, but we would not want to limit ourselves to this point. We have added a third figure to the two already mentioned, namely film critic Serge Daney (1944-1992), former director of the famous French Cahiers du cinéma, then of the magazine Traffic, because it seems to us that Daney has extended this ethico-political conception of semiotics, stemming from Sartre and Barthes, into the realm of the image. We can find such an approach in his various articles on cinema and television, of course, compiled in different collections, such as Le Salaire du zappeur  (The TV flicker’s wage) (23) or his Ciné journal (Cine-diary) (24), prefaced by Gilles Deleuze. But nowhere is this more explicit than in the authentic documentary-testament, Itinéraire d'un ciné-fils (Itinerary of a cine-son), made by Pierre-André Boutang and Dominique Rabourdin shortly before the critic's death from AIDS in 1992 (25). In this lengthy interview with Régis Debray, Serge Daney presents his autobiography as a cinephile and his theory of the image. The critic explicitly returns to the ethical nature of cinema. Just as, for Barthes, the great book is not just a question of “style” but rather of “writing”, so, for Daney, filming, making cinema, is not just about making “images”, or even beautiful “images”. Filming is above all about “showing”, wanting to “show” something. He asserts:

The act of showing is surely the essence of cinema, not the images at all. Images may be the essence of media and TV. The act of showing, insofar as it is an act. (...) If it's an act, there's a possibility of morality; if it's not an act, there's no possibility of morality. (...) (...) Do you think they show something on TV? On TV, they program stuff. It's not shown, so people don't see it. How can one see what is not shown?

We find here the same Sartrean and Barthesian idea: the sign is made to show, to unveil. In the wake of Sartre and Barthes, we understand, thanks to Daney, what new issues we can bring to the question of the “image”. Thus, the “image” - film, for example, but it could just as easily be video, photography or even plastic arts - is not just an object, or even a technical topic. It is the manifestation of one's freedom, in relation to others and to society as a whole. The central question for semiotic aesthetics is no longer whether an artist is good or bad, or more or less original. Strictly speaking, it is no longer a question of knowing how the work is made, because this question, while important, becomes relative to another, even more essential question. If we follow Daney's idea, the questions that this semiotic aesthetics should be asking are: what does this image show me? What exactly is it trying to show me? And first of all, does it show anything at all? Are we sure of this? Because not all images show. Some are not made to show, but rather to hide. Their purpose is not that we can see, but that we cannot see. They are images, but images for not seeing. Their purpose is the dissimulation of what there is to see, and its substitution by another image.

This image, which is made for not seeing, is precisely what Daney defines as “the visual”, or “the unimage” (in French: “la non-image”), that is to say, “the sum of substitute images”. Daney affirms: “I call “visual” (...) the image that comes in place of another, that we no longer want to see.” He adds:

We could temporarily name as “visual” the sum of substitute images, for very specific reasons. (...) In all the events that take place in the world, there is an image that very quickly comes to cover all the others and avoid them.

But the image “made for not seeing” is not useless. According to Daney, it is an essential function in our society, because there is a “market of substitute images”, images produced instead of the one that would enable us to see, and therefore to understand. In Daney's time, this “market” was dominated by advertising and television. Today, we could add the Internet and Big Tech. 

As an example of the concept of the “visual”, Serge Daney evokes the famous charity song “We are the World”, by the supergroup USA for Africa, featuring the biggest US stars of that time, not only Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, the song's composers, but also Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, and many others. Indeed, Daney explains to Debray: “I name as “visual” the image of the singer in place of the children”, meaning the substitution of an information about Ethiopian children victims of famine by the image of an US pop singer, which comes to cover and erase the tragic reality of this African country.

Serge Daney has chosen his example very well because everything about this music video is fascinating. Everything is interesting to analyse from a semiological point of view, as much in a musical perspective as in a cinematographic one. In particular, the competition between the singers to see who can best impose their vibrato on the other's phrasing, when they are supposed to be united in a collective work that goes beyond them, a “charitable” work (Cindy Lauper particularly succeeds in imposing herself). The fact, for example, that the two composers are Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, and that Lionel Richie starts the video with the first sentence of the song, but in exchange Michael Jackson has the right to initiate the chorus and the first bridge which is important in a pop song. Moreover, Michael Jackson is the only singer to appear with an upward vertical tracking shot, whereas all the other singers are filmed in close shots or medium close shots. Obviously, the tracking shot on Jackson is a way of showing off his distinctive silver socks and glove. So, we can recognize the sign of Michael Jackson before we can see his face. The idea here is clear: unlike other singers, Jackson is not a human being like the others, who manifests his personality through the expression of his humble face (a face, by the way, much refined by surgery, but he was not the only one at the time). Michael Jackson is a living concept, whose clothing symbol anticipates his physical presence. Likewise, we could comment on the duets between singers, as in the chorus where black soulman Stevie Wonder performs “the melody” and white rocker Bruce Springsteen responds with a “counter-melody”. It makes one wonder whether this is not the real aim of the music video, when the images and music are analysed in detail: the charity for Africa is intended, on a semiological plane, not to solve the famine in Ethiopia, which is never mentioned either lyrically or pictorially, but to affirm the cultural unity between black and white people in the USA - a society extremely divided by racial conflict. Is Ethiopia's tragic situation merely an alibi for the US citizens to solve their internal social problems, at least from a symbolic point of view? Is it unity with Africa that is claimed in this music video, compassion for its sufferings, or, is it rather the unity of the US citizens among themselves beyond the racial conflict? 

But above all, the most significant thing is that in this charity song for Africa, there is not a single African person, or even an image of them. All the singers are American, Canadian, British and so on. The aim is supposed to be aid for the Ethiopian people, but the word “Ethiopia” is never pronounced in the song, nor represented in the images. And there are even fewer attempts to explain the roots of the Ethiopian famine linked to the country's strategic position in the Cold War. As an anecdote (26), a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine recounts that Stevie Wonder nevertheless had a little lucidity during the recording, and clearly saw that there was a problem. Michael Jackson had included an onomatopoeic chorus in the first version of the song to make it sound like an African language. Stevie Wonder objected and argued with Jackson. He called in one of his friends to translate a passage into Swahili. The problem was that Ethiopians do not speak Swahili. So, in the end, the song remained in English. In other words, Stevie Wonder was a little more politically aware than the others, and that is a good thing to know after all.

Globally, in this music video, we are faced with a total invisibilisation of the other, whom they are supposed to come and help. The United States gives through charity business, but it does not matter who they give to. They do not give to anyone (27), they give to the world, and they give themselves to the world. What is important is the expression of power through the “gift” because, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) explained, giving to someone without giving them the opportunity to give back, making a “gift” without any possible “counter-gift”, even symbolic, is the worst possible humiliation (28). And it is, of course, a way of dominating the other through the debt - a debt that could be material, economic, but which could also be a debt of a semiotic essence by producing a discourse or an image which excludes the possibility of a response from the other.

If we accept this hypothesis, which seems to be confirmed by what the music video precisely represents, we understand who is “this world”. So, who is “we” in “We are the World”? Are we really in the world? It is a question we have to ask ourselves. The United States is “the world”, or even the United States with the others peoples of the Anglosphere represented by certain Canadian or British singers. This is obviously a declaration of global hegemony. And there is no coincidence that this song was published in 1985, the year of Gorbachev's Perestroika. This means that the US will be the sole superpower for at least 20 years due to the collapse of the USSR, which has already begun with the failed reforms of Perestroika (29). A strong reason to be united among blacks and whites in the USA. The music video says: we are going to become the only superpower, we are going to become the world itself, and initiate economic globalization.

With this well-chosen example by Daney, we can see here the full effectiveness of the concept of “visual” - all that it allows us to understand in the ethico-political dimension of semiotics.

Conclusion

The issue of “visual” asks us all an ethical, and therefore political, question. Are we ready to see the world as it is? Are we capable of representing it as it appears to us? At a time when billions of people produce and publish texts and images every day, if only through the use of the Internet and social networks, this issue, which in the days of Sartre and Barthes was the domain of intellectuals, is becoming increasingly present in our daily lives. Do we wish to show our contemporary reality in a completely new form, in order to grasp the perpetual unseen dimension of reality itself? Are we ready, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, to “tell in a different way, in order to tell something else in the end” (30)? Do we therefore wish to speak differently, make images differently, think differently, write differently, make music differently, etc., in order to signify something else? Or, are we going to cover up the world with “unimages”, the “visual” which is made for not seeing? It is on this great ethical and semiotic question that our times must decide.

NOTES

1. While the 1960s marginalized Sartre's work in favor of structuralism, May 68 is seen as Sartre's revenge on the generation that had excluded him (the generation of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, etc.). May 68 marked a return to a thinking of freedom, subjectivity, spontaneity and history, against the objectivism and ahistoricism (real or supposed) of most representatives of structuralism. It would be interesting to show how Sartre's theory of freedom, but also that of Breton's surrealism, were revalorized by the insurgent students during the Paris Spring. Thus, not only was May 68 a political and social rupture, but also an intellectual and cultural one, thereby an existential rupture. For a first philosophical and historical approach to French May 68, we refer to our brief text (in Spanish): “Mayo del 68 en Francia, Una introducción”. https://estheosoc.hypotheses.org/1174 

For a more detailed study of the student revolt in Occitània, we refer to our historical study of May 68 in Toulouse (published in French): “Métamorphose de la critique de l'Université dans le Mai étudiant toulousain”. https://estheosoc.hypotheses.org/1693 

2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage. Paris : Pocket, 1962, p. 293-294. 

3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris : Gallimard, 1960.

4. Lévi-Strauss, Idem.

5. Sartre answers this question most explicitly in his 1966 text “L'Anthropologie”, in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations IX, Mélanges. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.

6. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Note sur la photographie. Paris : Editions de l’étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980.

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Imaginaire : psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination. Paris : Gallimard, 1940.

8. Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture / Nouveaux essais critiques. Paris : Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1953, 1972, p. 63-64.

9. Ibid., p.15.

10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature ?. Paris : Gallimard, 1948.

11. Roland Barthes, Idem, p. 18. All quotations from French text in this article are translated by the author.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 17.

15. Ibid., p. 18-19.

16. Ibid.

17. Aristote, Poétique. Paris : Editions Mille et une nuits, 1997, p. 17.

18. Aristote, Les Politiques. Paris : Garnier-Flammarion, 1992, p. 91-92.

19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Idem, p. 29-30.

20. Barthes, Idem, p. 19.

21. Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Paris : Editions du Seuil, 1957, p. 9.

22. Idem, p. 29. Explaining why Barthes shifts from a “morality of form” to a “morality of sign” would require a specific study which could be the topic of one of our future work. The important thing for us in this text is to show the continuity of the ethical conception of semiotic activity in Barthes's thought.

23. Serge Daney, Le Salaire du zappeur. Paris : Ramsay/Libération, 1988.

24. Serge Daney, Ciné journal : 1981-1986. Paris : Cahiers du cinéma, 1986. 

25. This is obviously a French pun between “cinéphile” (fan of cinema) and “ciné-fils” (son of cinema). Pierre-André Boutang, Dominique Rabourdin, Serge Daney, Itinéraire d’un ciné-fils. France : Sodaperaga, 1992.

26. See https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/we-are-the-world-a-minute-by-minute-breakdown-54619/

27. Jean Baudrillard, Power Inferno. Paris : Editions Galilée, 2002, p. 78-79.

28. Jean Baudrillard, La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu. Paris : Editions Galilée, 1991, p. 30-31.

29. On the failure of Perestroika, an unavoidable failure inscribed in the very structure of these reforms, I refer to the great Russian dissident Alexander Zinoviev, and in particular to the title of his novel where everything is said in a single concept: “Katastroika”. Alexander Zinoviev, Katastroïka. Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, 1988.

30. In his famous interview in 1972, after making Tout va bien. ORTF, “La politique et le bonheur : Georges Kiejman”, Vive le cinéma. Paris: Office national de radiodiffusion télévision française, 1972.